You know you're "addicted" to tea when ....

When someone catches you taking a quick deep sniff of your tea in your cubicle, you feel the urge to blurt out “Its not what it looks like!”

You are the definitive “Tea Person” in the office, never seen without a cup beside you.

A large part of your morning is planning the tea you are going to have throughout the day.

You tend to get “creative” with your budgeting when it comes to tea. “Yeah I’d say that tea counts as entertainment AND groceries. TEABUDGETDOUBLED. SUCCESS.”

Words like “grassy” or “earthy” to describe the taste of something sound like a definite plus.

There are only three available beverages available in your home: tea, water, and milk.

You will never allow someone uninformed about tea EVER make a cup of tea for you. Especially if they can’t even boil pasta without making it into a bowl of mush.

At any given time, you are on the brink of breaking down to spend over $50 in tea in less than a minute. Since you probably have more than one site where the shopping cart is already filled, and it is only waiting on you to click the “Checkout” button. All you need is an excuse. Birthday? Payday? It’s Thursday? You aren’t broke yet?

Even after you order your shipment of tea, you have already started filling up the shopping cart in anticipation for the next order.

Only you know how much you spent on tea and tea related paraphernalia, and you will never tell.

For when a guest comes over and asks what kind of tea you have, you are contemplating on just making a menu to hand to them. Or else you will ask more questions thank a Starbucks barista asks their customers. “Do you want something cold or hot?” “Sweet or not sweet?” “Something nutty? earthy? fruity? flora? grassy?” “What style do you want the brew to be? Gongfu or western?” “Oh yeah one more question: Milk, sugar, honey or lemon?”

Love this post! I am constantly running into the one about only having three beverages in the house (water, tea and milk). My mom comes over and usually asks for something else but I never have anything else.
I’ve actually made up a menu of all of my teas. I think it needs updating though. hahaha But it is funny when people come over and want to try a tea and ask what I have, ’cause then I have to ask them what they are craving ’cause normally I have something that fits what they want…

I can relate to several of these. I drink tea all day at my cubicle and I’m always deeply breathing in the steam of the first, fresh mug of tea at the start of my shift. I have a ritual of preparing my tea space before my work day begins.

I also spend time preparing my tea drinking. I fill several infusers with the teas I’ll need for the day. If it’s getting cold in the office, chai works. If I’m more tired than usual, I’ll bring Earl Grey. if the day is going to be boring, I’ll start with a fruity tisane and graduate to genmaicha by afternoon. If I need to concentrate, something mellow and calming like jasmine goes into an infuser. It’s a weird science, but I guess I could be obsessed about worse things.

When guests come over, you make mental notes on their tea fluency. For guests who know about tea, you give them your good tea; for guests who don’t know or care much about tea, you don’t bother wasting your best teas on them; instead, you brew up some old or ill-favored tea.

When it’s tea-time, you’re very firm about making tea yourself, as you don’t want anyone “spoiling” the tea.

At tea-time, you have a camera ready, snapping pictures to create a photo album of your recent tea session.

… Co-workers hit you up for tea because they know you always have something better than what’s being offered in the break room.

… You have a detailed spreadsheet of which teas you’ve had, if you’d buy them again, and what you’re going to buy next.

… Yeah, there’s a tea for that – and it’s in your cupboard.

… There’s a particular tea that you don’t like on it’s own, but keep around because it’s great to blend with.

… Weighing the option of paying for shipping or just getting enough tea to qualify for free shipping is the biggest decision of your day.

… You loose track of which tea order is coming from which company on a given day.

… You justify your tea purchase – to yourself.

… Open your cupboard and can’t decide whether to have the tea that tastes like sweet strawberries, the other one that is more like creamy strawberry, or the tart tasting strawberry tea. Then decide to blindly pick one and it ends up being none of those, but you’re still happy with your choice.

… The movie you’re watching at home has to be paused twice to make more tea and another three times for a potty break.

… bedtime is 11pm. You lay awake reading Steepster. In the morning, your significant other asks how late you were up reading last night and you sheepishly answer, “I think I saw 3:20.”

The first few reminds me of a story. A co-worker did a snuck up on me in my in my cubicle and said “Hey you seem like a tea person, do you have anything for a sore throat?” And suddenly my eyes went wide and I went into this almost salesman mode. “Oh I have just the thing for you!” And I reach up and open my overhead compartment to reveal my stash and in that moment, I knew that he knew that he came to the right person.

I swear if I were able to sell tea from my cubicle I could definitely turn a profit. Get supplied by my dealer, I take a portion of the tea to sell amongst my peers. Why haven’t other things adopted this business model it sounds like it can be pretty successful…. oh wait.

You come to the sudden realization (cough) that, at your current rate of consumption, you currently have more tea than you can physically drink before it goes stale and nasty to the point of being undrinkable – but that in no way changes your plans to buy more. You just resolve to drink more tea faster.

When you don’t just smuggle tea into the house, but outright lie to your family about the prices of tea they do know you’ve bought, claiming you bought them at non-existent clearance sales so that they’ll respond by agreeing that you shouldn’t have missed such a good sale, and even shaving a dollar or two off every one they know you bought at full price.

I’m very close to the point of justifying purchasing one of those, especially since I’ve been home for the last six months! But once I start working again, we’ll see how I feel about it then. In the meantime, I’m champing at the bit with impatience… :-/

When you start talking about one tea and end up explaining far more than necessary. I did this with my grandparents today but I think they were genuinely interested to hear everything I had to say, but some people (cough, my mom) clearly get tired of it!

When you have a bag specifically for taking tea with you when you’re staying somewhere else for at least one night!

When you start incorporating tea as one of the ingredients in your cooking – much to the shock of the little kiddies. “Oh, those aren’t chocolate chunks in your cookies honey, those are tea leaves! They’re yummy and full of organic goodness” Kids: “Eeww! I don’t wanna eat leaves!”

Your face glows effervescent green because you’ve just mixed green tea powder into facial cream, applying it to your face. Amazingly, no one seems to notice that you look like a green alien as you go out for the day with green tea powder still on your face.

Hahahaha…….Nina, Sencha is a great name for a dog. :)) Darjeeling teas are some of my favorites, and before I got Lotis, I was thinking of a name for a dog (female) that was tea related. I thought of Darla, and tried to think of a shortened name Like Darja, Darjee, Darjeely. Lol :-)) Of course if that didn’t work, there was always Jasmine!